Christopher Hurst: a publisher in the world

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The death of a close and
longstanding colleague is a singular form of bereavement. This at least is my
experience in recalling the publisher Christopher Hurst, with
whom I worked for more than twenty years in a partnership it would be unjust to
describe as merely a "working" one. It was more than that, and not just in
terms of its longevity. It was akin perhaps to the "odd couple", which was how
I sometimes characterised it to friends and other colleagues. While we never
separated, even on a trial basis, there were many disagreements over important
issues (such as which book to publish or cover design we preferred) and trivial
ones too (did we need printed stationery, a clock on the office wall or a new
typewriter ribbon?)

Above all, we remained
colleagues and friends, while jealously guarding our divergent views about many
subjects, for we shared an abiding passion - publishing books of the highest
quality, especially in terms of their editing and production values. And what
an extraordinary and deeply held passion it was: Christopher was incapable of boarding a plane
or train, waiting for a haircut or to meet the bank manager, without a
manuscript in his bag, pen to hand, ready to deploy his fierce and
uncompromising intelligence for his author's benefit.

Christopher was a brilliant
editor: a man who saw nothing contradictory in spending weeks and in some cases
months honing a manuscript that ultimately would be read by (at most) a few
thousand people - and sometimes many fewer. The books bore the publisher's
name, but the obsessive zeal with which he worked and reworked the text of a
history of this or the politics of that was not motivated by ego. He had a
strong sense of who he was and his place
in the world, but neither glory nor financial reward was what kept him going;
in fact he had a natural aversion to what we in the trade of scholarly
publishing laughingly call "bestsellers", and was always concerned lest
"inadvertently", or in a fit of absent-mindedness, we acquired one, warning me
several times each year how a wildly successful book could spell ruin for the
firm.

openDemocracy authors whose work is also published by C Hurst & Co include (with, in each case, their latest
article):

Perhaps fortunately for both
of us, we never put this adage to the test, and I soon realised he was far
happier for his books to shine a little light in to a dark corner rather than
to illuminate the horizon. As a consequence, when pitching a title that I
wished to commission, or one of those I had been approached to publish, I
generally did much better by playing down its likely impact on the literary
pages and bestseller lists. When Christopher realised a book would do only moderately well, he retreated behind his pile of manuscripts in our palatial
suite of rooms in London's King Street, looking marginally less worried than he
had at the outset of our conversation.

Yet he was always willing to
accommodate change, albeit at a manageable pace, and had no time for tradition
for its own sake. This often manifested itself in unexpected ways. For example,
when fired by a new passion spurred by an overseas visit, a newspaper story, or
a conversation with a trusted author, he might rush into the office of a
morning and say: "Michael, we simply have
to publish a book about how the Inuit are being harmed by Nato fighter-jets
overflying Labrador"' or, "Don't you think we ought to do something about the
Central African Republic", or "Isn't it time we found someone to write a
history of Sikkim"? (or Paraguay, or the Seychelles).

As may be imagined, I often
greeted these outbursts with the greatest scepticism, and reacted as if I were
the senior figure in the relationship, curbing the naive excesses of a junior
member of staff. Such youthfulness of spirit, something he carried with him
right to the very end, was a terribly endearing characteristic of
Christopher's, something I continue to cherish.

The desire to publish a book
about the Sri Lankan Tamils, the regime of Charles Taylor in Liberia, or Slovenia,
bore out another trait of Christopher's, namely his extreme unpredictability.
"Never a dull moment" is a cliché, but it was an entirely apt one when working
with him. He had very few immovable opinions and though he was infuriating at
times I never thought of him as stubborn. Again this realisation came about
inadvertently. I forget the manuscript in question, except that after I had
spent five minutes extolling its virtues, Christopher interrupted me and, with
a wave of his hand, said: "Yes, yes, we must do the book; sign him up, sign him
up". I had just persuaded him to commission a book that, a week beforehand, he
had flatly refused even to consider. It was a tactic I turned to more than
once, knowing that Christopher judged each case on its merits, and that his
reactions reflected not just his mood but also his sense of what
publishers ought to be doing. The latter is a sentiment now almost entirely
absent from the world of corporate publishing in Britain and America.

This led him to seek out
books on topics that, at the time, filled some with horror; hence he published
titles sympathetic to the Ulster Protestants, or to opponents of the regime in
Beijing or in Hanoi, when many in the west still adored all that the People's
Republic of China or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam stood for, irrespective
of how their dissidents were treated. Christopher was unflinching in the face
of the criticism that such publishing decisions occasionally generated; indeed
it seemed only to spur him on.

I sometimes wondered whether
there was something about his privileged upbringing (his father was surgeon to
Britain's king) and education (Eton, Oxford, the army) that propelled him
towards championing the most rarified of lost causes and embracing the
"no-hopers" of international politics (the plight of the West Papuans, subject
to Indonesian imperialism and neo-colonialism, exercised him greatly and did
till the end of his life). In fact he had a very strong conviction that his
serendipitous role as a publisher based in London obliged him to publish books
of global concern, even though their readership might be miniscule.

Hence he published a chapter
by Steve Biko when few outside South Africa had heard of the young radical; he embraced the
idea of bringing to world attention the history of the Muslims of southeast
Europe, the forgotten children of the Ottomans, before, during and after the
outbreak of the most recent "Balkan war"; and he unerringly sought out
dissidents in the Soviet bloc (Pyotr Grigorenko, Zdenek Mlynar) and the PRC
(General Peng Dehuai) in order to publish their memoirs.

He was also indefatigable in
pursuing books that would have deterred a larger publishing house. Translating
several works from French (including the doyen of French Marxist historians of
colonialism in Africa, Jean-Suret Canale) did not distract him from running a
publishing company; neither did supervising the publication of Humphrey
Fisher's translation of Gustav Nachtigal's four volumes of Saharan travels,
this being one of the books closest to his heart.

It will soon be a year since
Christopher died, on 20 April 2007. But the
company he founded lives and - moderately, of course - thrives, while his relentless
energy, dynamism and desire to get things done are missed by many of those who
remember him.

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